12.21

“He’s right. This is serious.”

Chel studied Victor, searching for clues to his mental state. But if there was any sign of tension or pain, she didn’t see it.

“Yes, I know,” Victor said. “So… how’s Patrick doing in all this?”

“We’re not seeing each other anymore.”

“That’s too bad,” Victor said. “I liked him. And I suppose that means I am further and further away from godchildren.”

Victor’s old affection for her felt good, even after all they’d been through. “You should write your next book on the virtues of a one-track mind,” she told him.

He smiled. “Never mind that, then,” he said. He motioned for her to follow him. “I’m glad you’re here. You can finally see my exhibit.”

They doubled back into a dark gallery where the exhibit was being staged. It was still under construction, but a glass case covering the back wall was illuminated, and Chel walked toward the light, fearful of what she might find. Inside the case were four statues of men, each two feet tall, each constructed from a different material connected to Maya history: the first from chicken bones, the second out of dirt, the third from wood, and the last from kernels of corn. According to the Maya creation myth, there were three unsuccessful attempts by the gods to create mankind. The first race of men was made from the animals themselves, but they could not speak. The second was made from mud but could not walk, and the third race of men, made from wood, could not keep a proper calendar or worship their makers by name. It wasn’t until the fourth race of men, fashioned out of corn, that the gods were satisfied.

Studying the glass case, Chel noticed something. What was perhaps most interesting, and to her encouraging about Victor’s exhibit, was what he had chosen not to represent here: the fifth race of man. “So,” her mentor asked. “To what do I owe this great pleasure?”

* * *

CHEL COULDN’T HELP feeling that Victor Granning’s life had come to mirror the civilization to which he’d devoted his career: rise, fluorescence, collapse. By the time he was finished with graduate school at Harvard, he’d made breakthroughs on the use of syntax and grammar in ancient Maya writing. His academic books were celebrated and eventually made their way into the mainstream when The New York Times lauded him as the preeminent Mayanist in the world. After conquering the Ivy League, Victor migrated west to take the chair of UCLA’s department of Maya studies, where he helped launch the careers of many of the field’s next generation of scholars.

Including Chel. When she began her program at UCLA, Victor became her tutor. Chel could decipher glyphs faster than anyone in the department, even as a first-year. Victor taught her everything he knew about the ancient script. Soon she was more than just another of his mentees. Chel and her mother often spent holidays with Victor and his wife, Rose, at their clapboard house in Cheviot Hills. Chel’s first calls when she made tenure, and when she was appointed to the Getty, were to Victor. In the fifteen years since they’d met, he had been a constant source of encouragement, amusement, and, most recently, heartache.

Victor’s own collapse began in 2008, when Rose was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Spending every possible moment by her side, Victor began to search for answers. He couldn’t imagine life without Rose, and he became obsessed with Judaism in a way he hadn’t before: going to temple every day, keeping kosher and the Sabbath, wearing a yarmulke. But when Rose succumbed a year later, Victor turned against the religion; a God that had allowed her to suffer, he felt, couldn’t exist. If there was a higher power, it had to be something else entirely.

It was over the next nine months of mourning that Victor began to theorize about December 21, 2012. Undergraduates began buzzing about some offhand comments he’d made in class about the significance of the end of the Long Count cycle. At first, his students were fascinated, but they grew increasingly less attentive when Victor began using questionable sources that made unsubstantiated claims about Maya beliefs. Lecture time in linguistics classes was spent on the end of the thirteenth cycle and how some believed it would usher in a new era of mankind and a return to a simpler, more ascetic way of life. This was when a few students began to casually mention Victor’s classroom eccentricities to Chel. But at the time she didn’t yet realize how far off track he’d gone. Soon his lectures became diatribes about how cancer was caused by processed foods and how it was proof that humans needed to return to a more basic mode of living. Increasingly fearful of technology, he stopped using email for class-related information, forcing his students to come to office hours instead. Then he told them not to go on the Internet or drive cars and about how the Long Count would bring what the 2012ers called synchronicity—a consciousness of how all things in the world connected—leading to a spiritual renaissance. Chel tried to talk to him about other things, but every conversation veered quickly back to the absurd, and eventually she was at a loss for how to deal with it.

When Victor’s name showed up as the keynote speaker at the largest New Age convention in the country, and the press materials touted his UCLA connection, the administration reprimanded him. Then, in mid 2010, as June gloom shrouded the UCLA campus in mist, Victor called Chel at the Getty and asked her to come in to his office. There, he handed her a manually typed manuscript he’d been working on secretly for months. In large block letters, the title page read: Timewave 2012.

Chel turned to the introduction:

We live in a time of unparalleled technological change. We turn stem cells into any tissue we desire and our vaccines and panaceas will allow the average child born today to live longer than a century. But we also live in a time in which faceless drone operators fire missiles, and in which nuclear secrets steadily leak to oppressive regimes. Superhuman intelligences exist that we may soon be unable to control. The world financial crisis was accelerated by computer algorithms. We destroy our ecosystem with fossil fuels, and invisible carcinogens poison us.

In the late 1970s, philosopher Terence McKenna suggested that the most important points in scientifi c innovation could be graphed from the beginning of recorded history: the invention of the printing press; Galileo’s discovery that the sun was the center of the solar system; the harnessing of electricity; the discovery of DNA; the atom bomb; computers; the Internet. McKenna found that the rate of innovation was increasing and calculated the exact point when the slope of the line would become vertical. He believed that on that day—which he called Timewave Zero—technological progress would become infinite, and it would be impossible to control or to know what came next for civilization.

That day is December 21, 2012, the end of the thirteenth cycle of the five- thousand-year-old Maya Long Count, the day they predicted the earth would undergo a titanic transformation and the fourth race of man would be replaced. We do not yet know what the fifth race of man will be. But the upheavals we are seeing all over our world prove that a major transformation is coming. In the time left before 12/21, we must prepare ourselves for the change upon us.

“You can’t publish this,” Chel had told him.

“I’ve already shown it to a number of people, and they’re excited by it,” he said.

“What people—2012ers?”

Victor took a breath. “Smart people, Chel. Some have doctorates, and many have written books themselves.”

Chel could only imagine how revered he was in the 2012 community, especially when he stoked the fire of their misbegotten notions. Victor hadn’t done serious scholarship since his wife got sick—and this was his bid to be a star again.

But however much his newfound acolytes might have praised him for it, when he self-published Timewave 2012, the book was ridiculed, including in a scathing profi le in the Times. Among true scholars, it was worse: No one in the academy would ever take Victor seriously again. His grant money dried up, he was quietly forced from the university, and he lost his subsidized house.

Chel couldn’t abandon the man who’d given her so much. She let him stay with her in Westwood, and she gave him a research job at the Getty—albeit with conditions: no lectures to Luddites or 2012ers, and no railing against technology to her staff. If he kept those promises, he could use her libraries and be paid a small stipend to